Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment, 1905-1960 (review)

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear's well-written and carefully-argued study of Medillín's textile industry makes crucial interventions in gender and labor history. Drawing on newspapers, oral histories, company documents, and reports by local work inspectors, Farnsworth-Alvear provides a nuanced account of how gender shaped interactions between workers and employers in the first half of the twentieth century.

Stressing that gender ideology created normative distinctions between "good" and "bad" women as well as between men and women, Farnsworth-Alvear traces how gender shaped changes in the factories. During the early years of the textile industry (1905-1935), owners of small-scale mills established direct paternalistic ties with workers who were mostly women. These informal paternalistic ties broke down after 1935-36, when the election of Alfonso López Pumarejo, a populist Liberal, to the presidency prompted a series of strikes and labor mobilizations. Mill owners subsequently employed a more extensive and bureaucratic fordist style of paternalism to manage their growing workforces and avoid the formation of "communist" labor unions. They offered benefits to workers even as they demanded greater labor discipline. Responding to the notion that factory work was perilous for women, the largest mills not only refused to hire married women (who presumably belonged at home with their children and husbands) but also fired women who were found to have sex outside of marriage. Priests hired by the companies indissolubly joined "sexual comportment, hard work, and Catholicism ... to one another and to a higher good" (p. 178). This system persisted until 1953, when the introduction of new technologies spurred industrialists to hire men rather than women. As the workforce became increasingly male, mill owners replaced prior forms of discipline with Taylorist systems of time management, and paternalist forms of labor relations disappeared. In describing these shifts, the author seeks not to explain the transformations but to understand how evolving experiences of class and gender emerged from and influenced them.

Although the author views these changes as part of a transnational process, she focuses on local actors and events. Factory owners countered the local labor and leftist mobilizations of 1935-36 by institutionalizing paternalism. Perhaps more important, the staunch Catholicism that prevailed in Antioquia, along with the region's strong Catholic Social Action movement, shaped welfare capitalism there. Farnsworth-Alvear's arguments regarding the specificity of Medellín are convincing, yet the particularities of this case would have been more evident if the author had been more explicit about what was peculiar to the city. Engagement with the now extensive debates on gender and industrial restructuring in twentieth-century Latin America would have been particularly useful.

Farnsworth-Alvear's greatest contribution is her use of oral histories to uncover workers' subjective experiences of work. She rejects forms of class analysis that derive experience from a priori categories and argues against seeing workers' actions as always reacting to elites. Workers' viewpoints were contradictory, she insists, and their experiences and actions did not always resist or accommodate elite-fashioned norms; often, they existed alongside elite injunctions. Workers wore short dresses even as they averred the value of modesty. Others talked proudly of participation in strikes while denouncing worker militancy.

Farnsworth-Alvear's insistence on the complexity of laborers' work lives is compelling and innovative. Her close readings of worker testimonies reveal incongruities overlooked in prior studies. Still, most readers will probably be startled by the conservatism of the men and women Farnsworth-Alvear interviewed: their intense religiosity and belief in the value of women's virginity and their praise of bosses, anti-communism, and criticism of labor activists. In insisting on the intricacy of worker consciousness, Farnsworth-Alvear sidesteps the question of how to comprehend the varying levels and kinds of collusion...